For centuries, publishers have struggled to identify authors/writers and literary works which were of high enough quality or desirability to be accepted widely in the marketplace. The profitability of traditional publishers is largely due to established books with consistent yearly demand, “the backlist” (e.g., the bible).
Publishers and agents do attempt to publish works that are not already widely read. This category of books is known as the “frontlist.” A great deal of manual effort and expense goes into identifying, editing, and marketing these frontlist works and the success of individual works is highly variable. This success rate is so variable that publishers often lose money on marketing and manufacturing of frontlist books that do not sell at the forecasted levels. A very low percentage of works submitted by unknown authors to publishers and agents are actually deemed worthy of publication and the process for identifying these works is entirely manual and of further unrecoverable cost to publishers and agents. In fact, the work is often rejected by the publishers and agents based only on a letter describing the work which may not be appropriately representative of the work.
An established practice for unknown authors is to submit the same work to multiple publishers and agents in spite of rejections. Repeated rejections are a further inefficiency as authors/writers must spend years and significant effort resubmitting the same work to several publishers and agents who must at least spend expend enough effort to reject the work. In addition, rejections do not often provide constructive criticism to aid authors/writers in improving their works, continuing the likelihood of wasted effort in further attempts to resubmit for publication.
To minimize losses, publishers regularly market and print frontlist books by established authors with widely recognized names as they are more likely to be purchased by readers (e.g., Stephen King). This understandable preference makes it even more difficult for unknown author/writers to achieve publication.
In addition, authors and works who are later successful are often ones which were rejected repeatedly by publishers and agents. As a result of these inefficiencies, several alternative industries have been created. These industries include vanity publishing and self-publishing houses who receive payment from authors to publish the authors work. More recent alternatives include (1) on-demand publishers who store an electronic copy of the work and print upon demand; (2) electronic publishing on public networks where the edited or unedited works are posted for electronic purchase at discounted prices; and (3) organizations which contract with publishing houses to electronically publish unsolicited submissions which have not been reviewed by the publishers.
Marketing is another area of uncertainty, inefficiency and risk for publishers and authors who chose alternative publishing. As the success of an individual work is forecast based on opinion, so is the marketing effort and capital. Incorrect opinions have resulted in wasted capital and effort and are evidenced by the creation of discounted book warehouses where unsuccessful, overproduced books are sold at a loss in the attempt to recover some fraction of the cost of production and marketing.
Publishers often ask focus groups of readers to provide manual feedback on the likelihood of success of a particular work after it has been selected as a candidate for publication. This method of soliciting and accepting feedback varies between publishers and is limited in efficiency because it is largely manual process and used only for selected works prior to publication, and limited in the number of readers who provide feedback on a particular work.
In attempts to market books, authors and publishers have posted sections of books on internet sites allowing readers the option of reading portions of the work prior to purchasing either electronic or paper formats. In one case, a publisher recently posted sections of a widely accepted author's unpublished book on the internet and successfully invited criticism by readers in order to improve the book and to act as a marketing tool prior to publication. These postings were for published or widely accepted authors, however, and did not address the inefficiencies associated with the current, manual, inefficient, slow, expensive, and error prone processes for unknown author publication.
It can, therefore, be appreciated that there are many problems associated with the process of identifying and marketing authors/writers and works which are likely to be widely accepted in the marketplace. It can be further appreciated that these processes are disliked by all parties involved including authors/writers, agents and publishers.
Other drawbacks and problems also exist with current systems.